title: Listening to Limericks: a pupillometry investigation of perceivers' expectancy.
abstract: What features of a poem make it captivating, and which cognitive mechanisms are sensitive to these features? We addressed these questions experimentally by measuring pupillary responses of 40 participants who listened to a series of Limericks. The Limericks ended with either a semantic, syntactic, rhyme or metric violation. Compared to a control condition without violations, only the rhyme violation condition induced a reliable pupillary response. An anomaly-rating study on the same stimuli showed that all violations were reliably detectable relative to the control condition, but the anomaly induced by rhyme violations was perceived as most severe. Together, our data suggest that rhyme violations in Limericks may induce an emotional response beyond mere anomaly detection.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Scheepers
authors.forename: Sibylle
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Mohr
authors.forename: Martin H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Fischer
authors.forename: Andrew M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Roberts
mesh_terms: D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D006801:Humans; D009929:Organ Size; D011037:Poetry as Topic; D011680:Pupil / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors